‘The Little Brother,’ by Victoria Patterson

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By Amy Grace Loyd

Aug. 7, 2015

Victoria Patterson is a capable and ­canny writer, and she would have to be to take on the subject of her newest novel, “The Little Brother,” and produce so arresting and haunting an experience. To say the book is about a rape is true, but that’s only part of it — in many ways, the least interesting part. The real subject is the conditions that allow that rape to happen.

The story begins with a portrait of two brothers, Gabriel and Daniel Hyde. It’s narrated by the younger of the two, the little brother of the title, Daniel, who has been called “Even” ever since the boys were toddlers, when a jealous Gabe insisted everything be split evenly between them. Tricks of genetics already contribute to the ways siblings relate. Gabe, though 15 months Even’s senior, is smaller for much of the boys’ adolescence. He’s funnier, too, and often angrier, and soon has real cause to be. A messy divorce separates the boys as teenagers and makes the idea of a level playing field yet more fanciful: Gabe is left with the boys’ mother, a wellspring of rancor and need, in their hometown, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., while Even, and only Even, is invited to live with their now prosperous father in Newport Beach.

Gabe visits on weekends and brings with him a ragged, volatile longing. The boys’ father is rarely home, and when he is, he lets his self-made success, ready wads of cash and giant flat-screen TV do the talking — and mollifying — for him. Even, in keeping with his name (which is at once a provocation and a bit of wishful thinking), tries to keep the peace but is no match for his brother’s destructiveness. If Gabe and his friends, all testosterone-rich imports from Rancho Cucamonga, increasingly evoke “Less Than Zero,” Even leans more toward a Holden Caulfield inflected with a young Judy Blume heroine. He’s no angel — indeed, there aren’t many in this novel. As in Patterson’s other works set in Southern California, the story collection “Drift” and the novel “This Vacant Paradise,” her characters are often in thrall to the American dream and its material, rather than moral, rewards.

Here Patterson stacks the deck against anyone’s chances at virtue or connection. There’s the seductive setting; money, drugs and sex bartered for belonging; post-9/11 homilies with George W. Bush “looking like a frat boy”; and the looming presence of a sleazy local sheriff who puts the pig in chauvinist and the male in entitlement.

But there’s also real love and loyalty, and these feelings become unbearable when the balance of good and bad, between Jekyll and the irrepressible Hyde, is upset at last: Even finds himself in possession of a video that shows Gabe not merely participating in but directing the gang rape of an unconscious girl. The act is savage, but what’s more shocking still, and what Patterson trades on, in prose by turns lyrical and lean, is how recognizable the narrative becomes at this juncture. The crime is quickly robbed of its criminality with defenses that have become something like perverse memes: The victim asked for it, and deserved it, and boys of course will be boys. But though Even and Gabe are still underage, there are no more boys in this account, and the language that’s used next, about who will win and who will lose, is spoken by adults. Even is urged by these same adults to pick the right side — never mind doing the right thing. It’s a wonder he knows what that is or that in choosing a different narrative altogether, he may gain the world and a new day for his American dreams.